Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To?

Transcription

1 THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE VOL. LXIV, NO. 5 OCTOBER 2009 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? THOMAS W. BATES, KATHLEEN M. KAHLE, and RENÉ M. STULZ ABSTRACT The average cash-to-assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms more than doubles from 1980 to A measure of the economic importance of this increase is that at the end of the sample period, the average firm can retire all debt obligations with its cash holdings. Cash ratios increase because firms cash flows become riskier. In addition, firms change: They hold fewer inventories and receivables and are increasingly R&D intensive. While the precautionary motive for cash holdings plays an important role in explaining the increase in cash ratios, we find no consistent evidence that agency conflicts contribute to the increase. CONSIDERABLE MEDIA ATTENTION has been devoted to the increase in cash holdings of U.S. firms. For instance, a recent article in The Wall Street Journal states that The piles of cash and stockpile of repurchased shares at [big U.S. companies] have hit record levels. 1 In this paper, we investigate how the cash holdings of U.S. firms have evolved since 1980 and whether this evolution can be explained by changes in known determinants of cash holdings. We document a secular increase in the cash holdings of the typical firm from 1980 to In a regression of the average cash-to-assets ratio on a constant and time, time has a significantly positive coefficient, implying that the average cash-to-assets ratio (the cash ratio) has increased by 0.46% per year. Another way to see this evolution is that the average cash ratio more than doubles over our sample period, from 10.5% in 1980 to 23.2% in Everything else equal, following Jensen (1986), we would expect firms with agency problems to accumulate cash if they do not have good investment opportunities and their management does not want to return cash to shareholders. In the absence of agency problems, improvements in information and financial Thomas Bates is from the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. Kathleen Kahle is from the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. René Stulz is the Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University and is affiliated with NBER and ECGI. We are grateful to Viral Acharya, Heitor Almeida, Murillo Campello, John Cochrane, Harry DeAngelo, Gene Fama, John Graham, Campbell Harvey, Mike Lemmon, Bill Maxwell, Ronald Oaxaca, Amir Sufi, Jérôme Taillard, Luigi Zingales, seminar participants at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, University of Alberta, University of Arkansas, and the University of Chicago, an anonymous referee, and an anonymous associate editor for helpful comments. Bates and Kahle completed much of this work while on the faculty at the Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. 1 Ian McDonald, Capital Pains: Big Cash Hoards, The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2006, p.c

2 1986 The Journal of Finance R technology since the early 1980s should have led to a reduction in corporate cash holdings. For example, firms can hedge more effectively as more types of derivatives have become available, so the precautionary demand for cash should be lower than 20 years ago. It is therefore important to investigate whether the dramatic increase in cash holdings results from agency problems, represents an anomaly that challenges existing theories of the determinants of corporate cash holdings, or results from changes in firm characteristics and their business environment. The increase in cash holdings that we document has important implications for our understanding of the leverage of U.S. firms. Much of the finance literature measures leverage as the ratio of debt to assets or debt to equity. Using these definitions, there is little evidence of a decrease in average leverage for the firms in our sample. However, the net debt ratio (defined as debt minus cash, divided by book assets), a common measure of leverage for practitioners, exhibits a sharp secular decrease. Most of this decrease in net debt is explained by the increase in cash holdings. The fall in net debt is so dramatic that the average net debt for U.S. firms is negative in 2004, 2005, and Consequently, using net debt leads us to dramatically different conclusions about both the current level of leverage in U.S. firms and the evolution of leverage over the last 25 years. After documenting the increase in cash holdings and decrease in net debt, we investigate why the increase in cash holdings has occurred. We first examine the evolution of cash holdings for different subsamples of firms. Much attention has been paid to the cash hoards of large firms such as Microsoft and Exxon, both of which held in excess of $30 billion in mid However, we find that the increase in the average cash ratio is not explained by the evolution of cash holdings in large firms or in recent years. While large firms have experienced a substantial recent cash buildup, the average cash ratio has a significantly positive time trend for all size quintiles. Foley, Hartzell, Titman, and Twite (2007) show that one reason for the cash buildup is that U.S. firms had foreign profits that would have been taxed had they been repatriated. In our sample, we find that firms with no foreign income also experience a secular increase in the cash ratio. The increase in cash holdings is closely related to the disappearing dividends and new listings phenomena documented by Fama and French (2001, 2004). At the beginning of our sample period, firms that do not pay common dividends have essentially the same average cash ratio as firms that pay dividends. While there is a clear time trend in cash holdings and in net debt for firms that do not pay dividends, there is no time trend in these variables for dividend payers. By the end of the sample period, the mean cash ratio of the firms that do not pay dividends has more than doubled and the median has more than tripled. Over the sample period, the average net debt ratio for nondividend payers falls from 19.3% to 5.0%, and the median ratio falls from 21.4% to 5.7%. 2 See Ian McDonald, Cash Dilemma: How to Spend It, The Wall Street Journal, May24,2006, p. C3; Jesse Eisenger, Long & Short: The Tech Sector Is Hogging the Green Blanket, The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2006, p. C1; and Simon London, A Surplus of Cash Invariably Leads to a Shortage of Sense, Financial Times, November 30, 2005, Business Life, p. 13.

3 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? 1987 A plausible explanation for the secular increase in cash holdings for nondividend payers is provided by the precautionary demand for cash theory. Under this theory, firms hold cash as a buffer to protect themselves against adverse cash flow shocks. It is well known that idiosyncratic risk increased over much of our sample period (see Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001)). When we divide the industries in our sample into quintiles sorted by idiosyncratic cash flow volatility, we find that the average cash ratio increases by less than 50% for firms in the industries that experience the smallest increase in risk but by almost 300% for firms in the industries that experience the greatest increase in risk. Brown and Kapadia (2007) provide evidence that idiosyncratic stock return risk is higher for firms in more recent IPO listing cohorts. We show that firms in more recent listing cohorts hold more cash. Brandt, Brav, Graham, and Kumar (2009) find that the increase in idiosyncratic risk has partially reversed in recent years. We find that cash ratios have also fallen slightly in recent years. We next investigate whether the increase in cash holdings results from changes in firm characteristics, changes in the correlations between cash holdings and firm characteristics, or shifts in the demand for cash that are unrelated to firm characteristics. In other words, we identify whether cash holdings changed because firms moved along the demand curve for cash or because the demand curve shifted. For this exercise, we use regression models similar to those in Opler, Pinkowitz, Stulz, and Williamson (1999) (henceforth OPSW), which were derived before the recent run-up in cash holdings. We investigate whether allowing the intercepts and slopes of the estimated regressions to change in the 1990s and 2000s helps explain the cross section of cash holdings. Notably, the intercept falls over time, suggesting that the increase in the cash ratio cannot be explained by a shift in the demand for cash that is unrelated to characteristics known to be correlated with the cash ratio. Furthermore, while there is evidence of changes in slopes and intercepts, the importance of these changes is limited in that a regression that does not allow for these changes explains roughly as much of the variation in cash holdings as a regression that allows for such changes. We estimate a model of cash holdings using data from the 1980s and use it to predict the determinants of cash holdings in the 1990s and the 2000s. The parameters of this model help explain why cash holdings have increased in recent years. We use the model to assess how changes in firm characteristics explain the increase in cash holdings. Four variables are particularly important. First, firms hold less working capital (net of cash), and in particular fewer inventories and accounts receivable. The noncash components of working capital and cash are substitutes in that these components can be converted into cash relatively quickly. Second, cash flow volatility increases substantially. Since cash holdings are positively related to risk, the increase in risk has a substantial impact on cash holdings. Third, capital expenditures decline, and cash is negatively correlated with capital expenditures. Fourth, R&D expenditures increase, and firms with higher R&D expenditures hold more cash. Cash holdings do not increase for older, established firms that pay dividends, but firms that do not pay dividends increase their cash holdings dramatically.

4 1988 The Journal of Finance R Jensen (1986) argues that entrenched managers in firms with high free cash flow are reluctant to pay out cash to shareholders; thus, agency conflicts provide a plausible explanation for this difference. However, we also find that the firms whose cash holdings increase the most have low cash flow and high Tobin s q, characteristics not typically associated with serious free cash flow problems. We conduct three more formal analyses to assess whether agency problems can systematically explain the increase in cash holdings. First, we investigate whether the increase in the cash ratio is correlated with the GIM index of Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick (2003), an often-used proxy for managerial entrenchment. We find that the firms in the highest quintile of the GIM index, the firms in which managers are presumably most entrenched, experience the smallest increase in cash holdings from 1990 through Second, we consider whether cash has become less valuable as cash holdings have increased. If so, it is plausible that agency problems explain the increase in cash holdings. We find no evidence of a decrease in the value of cash. Finally, given an established line of research on the agency costs of excess cash, we examine whether modeled residuals can explain the future growth in cash balances. Our results indicate that there is a negative relation between excess cash and the future growth in cash holdings. Overall, the evidence is inconsistent with the notion that the increase in cash holdings over time can be systematically ascribed to agency problems in firms. The paper proceeds as follows. In Section I, we briefly review the theoretical determinants of cash holdings and the existing evidence. We describe our sample construction and document secular trends in cash holdings and net debt for our sample in Section II. We examine subsamples to understand whether these trends are driven by certain types of firms in Section III. In Section IV, we estimate regression models of the cash ratio and investigate whether the intercepts and slopes of these models change in the 1990s and 2000s. In Section V, we estimate a model of cash holdings for the 1980s and use it to identify the changes in firm characteristics that explain the increase in cash. We explore the agency explanation for the increase in cash holdings in Section VI. Section VII concludes. I. Why Firms Hold Cash The economics and finance literature have identified four motives for firms to hold cash. We review the theory and evidence on these motives briefly. 1. The transaction motive. Classic models in finance (e.g., Baumol (1952), Miller and Orr (1966)) derive the optimal demand for cash when a firm incurs transaction costs associated with converting a noncash financial asset into cash and uses cash for payments. Since there are economies of scale with the transaction motive, large firms hold less cash. There is much evidence supporting the existence of these economies of scale (see, for instance, Mulligan (1997)). 2. The precautionary motive. Firms hold cash to better cope with adverse shocks when access to capital markets is costly. Consistent with this

5 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? 1989 perspective, OPSW find that firms with riskier cash flows and poor access to external capital hold more cash. The precautionary motive also suggests that firms with better investment opportunities hold more cash because adverse shocks and financial distress are more costly for them. OPSW also find support for this prediction using market-to-book ratios and R&D spending as proxies for investment opportunities. Almeida, Campello, and Weisbach (2004) model the precautionary demand for cash and find that financially constrained firms invest in cash out of cash flow, while unconstrained firms do not. Han and Qiu (2007) extend this model to allow for a continuous distribution of cash flow. They show theoretically that an increase in the volatility of cash flow increases cash holdings for firms that are financially constrained, but has no determinate effect on other firms. Empirical evidence in Han and Qiu suggests that from 1998 to 2002, the cash holdings of constrained firms increase with cash flow volatility. Riddick and Whited (2009) question existing results on firms propensities to invest in cash out of cash flow because the literature does not adjust for measurement error in q; nonetheless, their model shows a positive relation between a firm s risk and its level of cash. Finally, Acharya, Almeida, and Campello (2007) develop a model showing that firms accumulate cash instead of reducing debt when the correlation between operating income and investment opportunities is low. In their model, firms that issue debt and hoard cash transfer income from high cash flow states of the world in order to fund investment in all states, including those with low cash flow. 3. The tax motive. Foley, Hartzell, Titman, and Twite (2007) find that U.S. corporations that would incur tax consequences associated with repatriating foreign earnings hold higher levels of cash. This is particularly true for affiliates for which the implied tax consequences of repatriation are the highest. Consequently, multinational firms are more likely to accumulate cash. 4. The agency motive. As argued by Jensen (1986), entrenched managers would rather retain cash than increase payouts to shareholders when the firm has poor investment opportunities. These discretionary cash holdings are typically estimated as the excess cash holdings derived from models controlling for the transaction and precautionary motives for holding cash. Dittmar, Mahrt-Smith, and Servaes (2003) find cross-country evidence suggesting that firms hold more cash in countries with greater agency problems. Dittmar and Mahrt-Smith (2007) and Pinkowitz, Stulz, and Williamson (2006) show that cash is worth less when agency problems between insiders and outside shareholders are greater. Dittmar and Mahrt-Smith (2007) and Harford, Mansi, and Maxwell (2008) provide evidence suggesting that entrenched managers are more likely to build excess cash balances, but spend excess cash quickly. These four motives for holding cash have different implications for the causes and consequences of the secular increase in cash for U.S. firms. We expect that firms and financial intermediaries have become more efficient in handling transactions, thus reducing transactions-based requirements for cash holdings.

6 1990 The Journal of Finance R The growth in derivative markets and improvements in forecasting and control suggest, all else equal, a lower precautionary demand for cash holdings. However, there has been a secular increase in idiosyncratic risk (Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001)). Irvine and Pontiff (2008) show that the increase in idiosyncratic risk mirrors an increase in cash flow volatility. These changes suggest a higher volatility in unhedgeable risks and hence a greater precautionary demand for cash holdings. As shown in Fama and French (2004), the composition of firms has changed because of an influx of newly listed firms with weak track records. Brown and Kapadia (2007) demonstrate that newly listed firms have permanently higher idiosyncratic risk, so the market-wide increase in idiosyncratic risk is due to a change in the composition of listed firms over time. We therefore expect cash holdings to be higher for newly listed firms in general, and for firms that go public later in the sample. As discussed in Foley et al. (2007), during our sample period, U.S. multinationals elected to defer the taxes associated with repatriated foreign earnings, suggesting that firms with foreign operating subsidiaries are more likely to hold higher cash balances. The 2004 Jobs Creation Act allowed firms to repatriate these foreign cash balances in 2004 and 2005 at a substantially lower marginal rate. We use firms with nonmissing foreign pretax income to identify firms for which avoidance of taxation on foreign income might lead to higher cash holdings. If the increase in the average cash ratio is explained by Jensen s (1986) free cash flow theory, then the bulk of the increase in cash holdings would occur in firms that generate free cash flow and have entrenched management that faces little pressure to pay out accumulated cash holdings. Firms generating strong free cash flow are firms with weak growth opportunities and hence low Tobin s q. Using the Gompers, Ishii, and Metric (2003) entrenchment index, we expect that firms with more entrenched management will experience a greater increase in the cash ratio. A number of papers (Pinkowitz and Williamson (2004), Faulkender and Wang (2006), Pinkowitz, Stulz, and Williamson (2006), and Dittmar and Mahrt-Smith (2007)) estimate the value of cash holdings. For example, Dittmar and Mahrt- Smith (2007) find that the value of cash is lower for U.S. firms with poor governance. Pinkowitz, Stulz, and Williamson (2006) find a similar result internationally. If there is an agency explanation for the increase in cash holdings, the value of cash should fall over our sample period. II. The Increase in Cash Holdings and the Decrease in Net Debt We construct our sample from the WRDS merged CRSP/Compustat files for the period 1980 to These data include surviving and nonsurviving firms that appear on Compustat at any time in the sample period. We require that firms have positive assets (Compustat data item #6) and positive sales (data item #12) to be included in a given year. We exclude financial firms (SIC codes ) because they may carry cash to meet capital requirements rather than for the economic reasons studied here. We also exclude utilities (SIC codes ) because their cash holdings can be subject to regulatory supervision.

7 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? 1991 Table I Average and Median Cash and Leverage Ratios from 1980 to 2006 The sample includes all Compustat firm-year observations from 1980 to 2006 with positive values for the book value of total assets and sales revenue for firms incorporated in the United States. Financial firms (SIC code ) and utilities (SIC codes ) are excluded from the sample, yielding a panel of 117,438 observations for 13,599 unique firms. Variable definitions are provided in the Appendix. Aggregate Average Median Average Median Cash Cash Cash Average Median Net Net Year N Ratio Ratio Ratio Leverage Leverage Leverage Leverage , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Finally, we restrict our sample to firms that are incorporated in the United States. The second column of Table I reports the number of sample firms in each year. We measure the cash ratio as cash and marketable securities (data item #1) divided by total assets (data item #6). The third column of Table I summarizes the aggregate cash ratio for the sample firms, which is the sum of cash divided by the sum of assets for all sample firms. This ratio is 6.3% in 1980 and increases to 10.3% by 2006, reaching a peak of 10.9% in The next column reproduces the average cash ratio for the sample firms by year. This ratio increases from 10.5% in 1980 to 23.2% in 2006, peaking in The same trend is conveyed by the median cash ratio, which is reported in column 5. The median cash ratio

8 1992 The Journal of Finance R in 2006 is 242% of the median cash ratio in 1980, while the mean is 221% of its value in To assess whether there was a statistically significant trend in the cash ratio, we estimate regressions of the cash ratio on a constant and time measured in years (not reported in a table). The coefficient on the time trend for the average cash ratio corresponds to a yearly increase of 0.46% and has a p-value below The R 2 of the regression is 89%. For the median, the slope coefficient represents a 0.27% yearly increase. It also has a p-value below The R 2 is 64%. This evidence is consistent with a positive time trend in cash holdings over the sample period. We note, however, that such regressions are only useful to characterize the evolution of the cash holdings during the sample period, and it would not make sense to extrapolate the in-sample trend to future years. We now turn to the implications of the increase in the cash ratio for the measurement of leverage. Column 6 of Table I reports average debt for our sample firms by year. We measure debt as long-term debt (data item #9) plus debt in current liabilities (data item #34), divided by book assets. While average leverage falls from 2001 to 2005, average leverage in 2004 is almost the same as it was 10 years earlier. Median leverage, reported in column 7, is low in the first half of the 1990s, and then increases before falling from 1998 to When we consider the average net leverage ratio, which subtracts cash from debt, we obtain a dramatically different perspective regarding the time trend in leverage for U.S. firms. The average net debt ratio is 16.4% in It falls during 15 years and becomes negative in the last 3 years of the sample. In a regression of the average net debt ratio on a constant and time, the coefficient on time represents a decrease of 0.60% per year and has a p-value of less than The last column of the table shows the median net debt ratio. This ratio also falls from 17.8% in 1980 to 1.5% in 2006; median net debt is negative in 2004 and III. How Pervasive Is the Increase in Cash Holdings? The evidence summarized in Section II illustrates a secular increase in the average cash ratio and a corresponding decrease in net debt. The decrease in net debt occurs because firms hold more cash rather than because they have less debt. To assess whether the increase in cash is related to firm size, we divide the sample firms into quintiles each year according to the book value of their assets at the end of the prior year. The results are similar if we use the market value of equity. Figure 1 illustrates the average cash ratios for the firm size quintiles over our sample period. The average cash ratio increases across each size quintile, but the increase is more pronounced for smaller firms. The increase in the average cash ratio for the largest firms is especially strong in the later years of our sample, although not in the most recent years. 3 From 1980 to their peak, average cash holdings more than double for the second and third quintiles 3 Though not reported, the average cash ratio of S&P 500 firms roughly doubles from 1998 to 2006.

9 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? 1993 Q1: Smallest firm size quintile Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5: Largest firm size quintile cash/assets Figure 1. Average cash ratios by firm size quintile from 1980 to The sample includes all Compustat firm-year observations from 1980 to 2006 with positive values for the book value of total assets and sales revenue for firms incorporated in the United States. Financial firms (SIC code ) and utilities (SIC codes ) are also excluded from the sample, yielding a panel of 117,438 observations for 13,599 unique firms. The cash ratio is measured as the ratio of cash and marketable securities to the book value of total assets. Firms are sorted into quintiles based on the book value of sample firm assets in the prior fiscal year. The first quintile (Q1) comprises the smallest firms in the sample, while the fifth quintile (Q5) comprises the largest firms in the sample. Year and almost double for all other quintiles. We again regress the cash ratio on a constant and time (measured in years) for each size quintile and find a positive and significant slope coefficient for each. Given this evidence, we conclude that the secular increase in cash ratios is not driven by the largest firms in our sample, and is markedly more pronounced in smaller firms. While not shown in the figure, average net debt falls sharply for the firms in the first three quintiles (the smallest firms), but shows little decrease for the largest firms. Notably, firms in the largest quintile have higher leverage in 2006 than in 1980, so the increase in leverage partly offsets the impact of the increase in cash holdings on net debt. All other size quintiles experience a decrease in leverage. The decrease in average leverage is small except for the second quintile. Median leverage, in contrast, falls substantially for the three smallest quintiles but increases for the largest firms. The 1990s witnessed a surge in IPO activity. IPO firms could have more cash because of the IPO and because they often issue seasoned equity within several years of the IPO. In columns 2 and 3 of Table II, we report average cash ratios for firms that, respectively, did and did not go public within the last 5 years. 4 The average cash ratio more than doubles (from 9.9% to 21.8%) for non-ipo firms 4 We use Thomson s SDC New Issues database to determine IPO dates, when available, and CRSP listing dates for firms not in SDC.

10 1994 The Journal of Finance R Table II Average Cash Ratios from 1980 to 2006 Delineated by New Issue Status, the Payment of Dividends, and Accounting Performance The sample includes all Compustat firm-year observations from 1980 to 2006 with positive values for the book value of total assets and sales revenue for firms incorporated in the United States. Financial firms (SIC code ) and utilities (SIC codes ) are excluded from the sample, yielding a panel of 117,438 observations for 13,599 unique firms. Firms are assigned to the IPO subsample if they have gone public within the prior 5 calendar years, and to the non- IPO subsample otherwise. A firm is classified as a dividend payer if it paid common dividends in that year. Firms with accounting losses at the fiscal end of the designated year are assigned to the negative net income subsample. Differences in the average cash ratio between the new issues, dividend status, and accounting performance subsamples are statistically different from zero at better than the 1% level for each reported year with the exception of differences in accounting performance for Variable definitions are provided in the Appendix. New Issues Dividend Status Accounting Performance IPO Non-IPO Dividend Nondividend Negative Net Nonnegative Net Year Firms Firms Payer Payer Income Income during our sample period. The average cash ratio for IPO firms is 21.1% in It peaks to 40.2% in 2004, but falls to 32.6% in Though not reproduced in the table, the median cash ratio for IPO firms triples over the sample period. When we estimate the time trend, the mean and median are significant for both

11 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? 1995 IPO and non-ipo firms. This evidence shows that the increase in cash holdings we document is not due to the capital raising activities of the IPO firms in our sample. We next turn to the role of dividends. Fama and French (2001) show that firms have become less likely to pay dividends during our sample period. Jensen s (1986) free cash flow theory suggests that nondividend payers with poor growth opportunities will accumulate more cash. In columns 4 and 5 of Table II, we reproduce the time series of the average cash ratio for dividend payers and nondividend payers. The average cash ratio of dividend payers in a sample year is the average cash ratio of firms that pay a common dividend that year. There is a dramatic increase in the cash ratio among the nondividend payers, but not among the dividend payers. For example, the average cash ratio of dividend payers is about the same in 2000 as in In contrast, the average (median) cash ratio of nondividend payers is 113% (211%) higher in 2006 than in Many papers consider nondividend paying firms to be financially constrained (for instance, Almeida, Campello, and Weisbach (2004)), suggesting that the increase in cash holdings occurred in financially constrained firms. In light of the model of Han and Qiu (2007), our evidence on the cash holding increases of nondividend paying firms supports the precautionary motive. Firms with negative net income are more likely to be financially constrained than firms with positive net income. The existing literature shows that the cash flow sensitivity of corporate investment in cash differs for financially constrained firms. We therefore divide the sample into firms with negative net income and other firms. We report average cash ratios for these subsamples in the last two columns of Table II. The firms with negative net income exhibit a dramatic increase in cash holdings. The average cash ratio of these firms almost triples over the sample period. Firms with nonnegative net income also exhibit an increase in cash holdings, but the time trend is markedly lower. The precautionary motive for cash holdings predicts that firms in industries that experience a large increase in idiosyncratic risk should have a greater increase in cash holdings than firms in industries that experience a small increase in idiosyncratic risk. To examine this, we divide the two-digit SIC code industries in our sample into industry quintiles according to their increase in cash flow volatility over our sample period. We measure cash flow risk as the standard deviation of industry cash flow to assets, computed as follows. For each firm-year, we compute the standard deviation of cash flow to assets for the previous 10 years. We require at least three observations. We then average the firm cash flow standard deviations each year across each two-digit SIC code. Strikingly, in recent years, more than half of the firms in the sample are in the industries in the top quintile of the increase in idiosyncratic volatility. Figure 2 shows the evolution of the average cash ratio for the five quintiles sorted according to the increase in idiosyncratic volatility. The firms in the highest quintile of the increase in volatility experience the most dramatic increase in cash holdings. The average cash ratio of these firms is 12.9% in 1980 and increases to 39.0% in The clear evidence from the figure is that the increase

12 1996 The Journal of Finance R Q1: Lowest cash flow volatility quintile Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5: Highest cash flow volatility quintile cash/assets Figure 2. Average cash ratios by idiosyncratic risk. The figure summarizes the average cash-to-assets ratio for quintiles of industries sorted by increases in idiosyncratic risk. We first divide the two-digit SIC code industries in our sample into industry quintiles according to the increase in idiosyncratic cash flow volatility over our sample period. We measure cash flow risk as the standard deviation of industry cash flow computed as follows. For each firm, we compute cash flow standard deviation for the previous 10 years. We require at least three observations for the standard deviation to be calculated. We then take the average across the two-digit SIC code of the firm cash flow standard deviations. The sample includes all Compustat firm-year observations from 1980 to 2006 with positive values for the book value of total assets and sales revenue for firms incorporated in the United States. Financial firms (SIC code ) and utilities (SIC codes ) are excluded from the sample, yielding a panel of 117,438 observations for 13,599 unique firms. The cash ratio is measured as the ratio of cash and marketable securities to the book value of total assets. in cash ratios is concentrated in industries that experience a large increase in cash flow volatility. The evidence that nondividend paying firms increase their cash ratio more than dividend paying firms is consistent with the evidence in Brown and Kapadia (2007) that the idiosyncratic risk of newly listed firms, which are less likely to pay dividends, has increased over time. We investigate this possibility directly by examining whether cash ratios are related to the period in which a firm went public. Following Brown and Kapadia, we construct cohorts of firms according to their listing date. The 1960s cohort includes all firms that have a listing prior to The 1970 cohort includes all firms that list from 1970 to We continue in this manner, constructing cohorts of firms that list within a 5-year period. We track the cash holdings of the cohorts from the 6th year following the listing year, to ensure that the cash accumulated at the IPO has been used. The results shown in Figure 3 are striking. First, each successive cohort, with the exception of the 1980s cohort, has a higher average cash ratio than the previous cohort in the early years of its existence (in the 2000s, the 1985, 1990, and 1995 cohorts become similar). Second, while cash ratios of Year

13 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? s 1970s 1975s 1980s 1985s 1990s 1995s 2000s cash/asset s Year Figure 3. Average cash ratios by an IPO cohort. The figure summarizes the average cashto-assets ratio for cohorts of firms constructed by listing date. The 1960s cohort includes all firms that have a listing prior to The 1970s cohort includes all firms that list from 1970 to We then construct cohorts of firms that list within a 5-year period. Cash holdings for each firm in each cohort are estimated beginning in the 6th year after the listing date. The sample includes all Compustat firm-year observations from 1980 to 2006 with nonmissing data for the book value of total assets and sales revenue for firms incorporated in the United States. Financial firms (SIC code ) and utilities (SIC codes ) are excluded from the sample, yielding a panel of 117,438 observations for 13,599 unique firms. The cash ratio is measured as the ratio of cash and marketable securities to the book value of total assets. the pre-1980 cohorts first decrease before experiencing a sharp increase at the end of the sample period, the cash ratios of the other cohorts mostly increase. The later cohorts do not see a reduction in cash ratios as they mature (except for the last 2 sample years), so that they hold more cash than firms in earlier cohorts at the same stage of their lifecycles. Thus, a substantial part of the increase in cash holdings can be attributed to the changing nature of newly listed firms over time. This result is the cash counterpart of the disappearing dividend result of Fama and French (2001). During the 1990s, an increasing proportion of newly public firms came from high-tech industries. If technology firms are more reliant on precautionary cash holdings, then the above results may be due to an increase in the proportion of high-tech firms in our sample. We use the definitions in Loughran and Ritter (2004) to categorize technology firms, and define old-economy manufacturing firms as firms with SIC codes that are not high technology firms. 5 In 1980, the proportion of firms classified as high-tech was 28%. By 2000 this proportion had increased to 45%. We find (but do not tabulate) that in every year the average cash ratio of high-tech firms is greater than the average cash 5 Results are quantitatively similar if we use the Department of Commerce definitions of hightech industries.

14 1998 The Journal of Finance R ratio of manufacturing firms. In the first 5 years (1980 to 1984), the average cash ratio of high-tech firms exceeds the average cash ratio of manufacturing firms by 54%; in the last 5 years, it does so by 45%. Throughout the sample period, the cash ratios of both types of firms increase. The average cash ratio increases slightly less for high-tech firms than for manufacturing firms; from the first 5 years to the last 5 years, the increase is 90% for high-tech firms and 101% for manufacturing firms. There is a positive and significant time trend for the average and median cash ratios for both groups of firms, and both groups exhibit a negative trend in net leverage. Consequently, while the increase in cash holdings and the decrease in net leverage can be ascribed to a change in the composition of listed firms over time, this effect cannot be attributed specifically to an increase in the proportion of technology firms in our sample. Foley et al. (2007) note that during our sample period multinationals benefited from retaining the cash they earned abroad, given that earning repatriation would often have negative tax consequences. Toward the end of our sample period, firms were allowed to repatriate cash held in foreign countries at a lower tax rate. We use nonmissing foreign pretax income to identify firms for which avoidance of taxes on foreign income might lead to higher cash holdings. There is no evidence that cash holdings increase more for firms with foreign pretax income in our sample period. In particular, while the average cash ratio of firms without foreign taxable income increases from 14.3% in 1990 to 25.3% in 2006, the cash ratio of firms with foreign taxable income is 10.8% in 1990 and increases to 20.2% in Agency theory predicts that cash holdings will increase for firms with high free cash flow. Our evidence on the changes in cash holdings for subsamples of firms is largely inconsistent with the agency explanation. In particular, we find that cash holdings increase more in firms that are financially constrained, as proxied by negative net income, than in other firms. Further, larger, more established firms are more likely to have agency problems of free cash flow that could lead to an increase in cash holdings. However, the increase in cash holdings is much more significant for smaller and recently listed firms. We further investigate the agency explanation for the increase in cash ratios in Section VI. IV. Did the Demand Function for Cash Holdings Change? In this section, we examine whether the increase in cash holdings can be explained by firm characteristics and whether the relation between firm characteristics and the cash ratio changes over time. We start from regressions that relate the cash ratio to firm characteristics and investigate whether such regressions can explain the increase in cash ratios through changes in firm characteristics. This approach attempts to identify whether there was a regime shift in how firms determine their cash holdings. The literature employs several alternative definitions of the cash ratio, including (1) cash to assets, (2) cash to net assets (where net assets equals book assets minus cash), (3) log of cash to net assets, and (4) cash to sales. Although

15 Why Do U.S. Firms Hold So Much More Cash than They Used To? 1999 cash to assets is the most traditional measure, OPSW use the cash-to-net assets ratio. The cash-to-net assets ratio generates extreme outliers for firms with most of their assets in cash. This problem is significant for our sample. Foley et al. (2007) use the logarithm of the cash-to-net assets ratio. Their measure reduces the magnitude of the problem of extreme outliers but does not eliminate it in our sample, which includes firms with assets less than $100 million. Thus, we focus primarily on regressions using cash to assets as the dependent variable, but reproduce regressions using the log of cash to net assets. Using cash to sales does not affect our results in a material way. The explanatory variables that we use follow OPSW and are motivated by the transaction and precautionary explanations for corporate cash holdings discussed in Section I. We incorporate the ratio of a firm s acquisition expenses to assets as an additional variable in the model since acquisitions and capital expenditures would seem to be substitutes. The variables used (Compustat annual data items in parentheses) are as follows: 1. Market-to-book ratio. Firms with better investment opportunities value cash more since it is costly for these firms to be financially constrained. We use the book value of assets (#6) minus the book value of equity (#60) plus the market value of equity (#199 #25) as the numerator of the ratio and the book value of assets (#6) as the denominator. 2. Firm size. There are economies of scale to holding cash. We use as our size measure the logarithm of book assets (#6) in 2004 dollars. 3. Cash flow to assets. We measure cash flow as earnings after interest, dividends, and taxes but before depreciation divided by book assets ((#13 #15 #16 #21) / #6). Firms with higher cash flow accumulate more cash, all else equal. Such firms might have better investment opportunities, but we control for these through other variables. 4. Net working capital to assets. Net working capital (NWC) consists of assets that substitute for cash. We thus expect a negative relation between NWC and cash holdings. We subtract cash (#1) from NWC (#179), so our NWC measure is net of cash. 5. Capital expenditures to assets. We measure capital expenditures as the ratio of capital expenditures (#128) to book assets (#6). If capital expenditures create assets that can be used as collateral, capital expenditures could increase debt capacity and reduce the demand for cash. Further, as shown by Riddick and Whited (2009), a productivity shock that increases investment can lead firms to temporarily invest more and save less cash, which would lead to a lower level of cash. At the same time, capital expenditures could proxy for financial distress costs and/or investment opportunities, in which case they would be positively related to cash. 6. Leverage. We measure leverage as long-term debt (#9) plus debt in current liabilities (#34) divided by book assets (#6). If debt is sufficiently constraining, firms will use cash to reduce leverage, resulting in a negative relation between cash holdings and leverage. The hedging argument

16 2000 The Journal of Finance R of Acharya, Almeida, and Campello (2007), however, is consistent with a positive relation between leverage and cash holdings. 7. Industry cash flow risk. We expect firms with greater cash flow risk (measured as discussed in Section III) to hold more precautionary cash. 8. Dividend payout dummy. We define a dummy variable equal to one in years in which a firm pays a common dividend (#21). Otherwise, the dummy equals zero. Firms that pay dividends are likely to be less risky and have greater access to capital markets, so the precautionary motive for cash holdings is weaker for them. 9. R&D to sales. This variable also measures growth opportunities. Firms with greater R&D are assumed to have greater costs of financial distress. R&D expenditures consume cash, but R&D s role as a proxy for growth opportunities and financial distress could lead to a positive relation between the cash ratio and R&D spending. R&D is measured as R&D (#46) / sales (#12), and is set equal to zero when R&D (#46) is missing. Results are similar if we use R&D/assets. 10. Acquisitions to assets. Acquisition activity is defined as acquisitions (#129) / book assets (#6), where acquisition expenditures reflect only the cash outflows associated with acquisitions. We would expect the sign on this coefficient to be the same as the sign for capital expenditures. Data requirements limit the size of our sample. For example, the unrestricted sample has 3,297 observations in 2006, but only 2,735 observations have sufficient data to estimate the OPSW regressions. The sample that meets the data requirements has an increase in the average cash ratio of 112.0% over the sample period, close to the increase of 121.3% for the unrestricted sample. Outliers in firm-year explanatory variables are winsorized as follows: Leverage is winsorized so that it is between zero and one. R&D/assets, R&D/sales, acquisitions/assets, cash flow volatility, and capital expenditures/assets are winsorized at the 1% level. The bottom tails of NWC/assets and cash flow/assets are winsorized at the 1% level, and the top tail of the market-to-book ratio is winsorized at the 1% level. We report our initial regression results in Panel A of Table III. Our standard errors allow for clustering by firm and by year, using the procedure in Cameron, Gelbach, and Miller (2006). Model 1 of Panel A shows the estimates for the regression using all sample years. Given our data restrictions, the panel consists of 100,414 firm-year observations for 12,792 unique firms. We do not use dummy variables for years or for industries in this regression. Market to book and cash flow risk (industry sigma) have positive and significant coefficients. The sign and significance of the coefficients on size, NWC, leverage, R&D, and the dividend dummy are also similar to those documented in OPSW (whose sample ends in 1994). Capital and acquisition expenditures both have negative and significant coefficients. The sign on capital expenditures is sensitive to whether the dependent variable is the ratio of cash to assets or the log of the ratio of cash to net assets. Model 2 of Table III re-estimates Model 1 using the log of cash to net assets. In this